From best picks to the puzzlers, reviewing the Seahawks’ draft selections

Seattle Times | May 2

The seventh NFL draft of the Pete Carroll/John Schneider era at times veered off their previously charted path.

As Pete Carroll joked when he sat down to meet the media Thursday night “so this is what a first-round news conference feels like’’ a reference to the fact that the team hadn’t needed to hold one since 2012.

Seattle also bucked its usual draft strategy by trading up twice, matching the number of times the Seahawks had done that in the previous six years under Schneider/Carroll.

That Seattle’s 10-player haul received some fairly diverging grades from draft analysts, though, made it business as usual for a team those drafts rarely garner a consensus review. One NFL.com analyst awarded the Seahawks an A (as well as A’s for each of the three days) and ESPN’s Mel Kiper Jr. a B-plus, while the influential if often-controversial football analytic site Pro Football Focus gave it a C, lower than all but four other teams.